With a series of similarities already documents, researchers found another way chimpanzees resemble humans: they like to drink.
According to BBC News, authors of a study published in the journal Royal Society Open Science spent 17 years observing wild chimps in Bossou, Guinea ferment the sap from raffia palm trees in order to enjoy an alcoholic beverage. Chimps even drank to the point of inebriation in some instances.
The chimps in the West Africa region would begin extracting the sap from the tree's crown, leaving a container to collect the contents, which were gathered at the beginning and end of each day. To drink the "palm wine," the chimps would crumble up leaves to form a sponge-like object used to soak up the drink.
"Chimpanzees at Bossou (Guinea, West Africa) have applied their knowledge of how to make and use leafy tools to exploit a new liquid resource, palm wine," study lead author Kimberley Jane Hockings, of Portugal's Center for Research in Anthropology and Oxford Brookes University, told Discovery News. "This new use of elementary technology shows once again how clever and enterprising are humankind's nearest living relatives."
Hockings and her team determined the chimps' palm wine was three percent alcohol by volume. Some chimps displayed telltale signs of drinking as well, like falling asleep or becoming restless.
"Some individuals were estimated to have consumed about 85ml of alcohol, the equivalent to 8.5 UK units [approximately equal to a bottle of wine]," Hockings told BBC News. "While other chimpanzees were making and settling into their night nests, he spent an additional hour moving from tree to tree in an agitated manner. Again pure speculation, but it's certainly something we would like to collect further data on in the future."
